Skyrunning

The idea of creating a sports discipline was the brainchild of Italian mountaineer Marino Giacometti, who, with a handful of fellow climbers pioneered records and races on Mont Blanc and Monte Rosa in the Italian Alps in the early ’90’s. In 1993, with the support of the multinational Fila as sponsor, skyrunning took off across the world’s mountain ranges with a circuit of awe-inspiring races stretching from the Himalayas to the Rockies, from Mount Kenya to the Mexican volcanoes.

From sea to sky, skyrunning spans the great outdoors, across the world’s mountain ranges…and the imagination of thousands of participants and fans. It’s a sport born in the wild, where the logic was to reach the highest peak in the shortest time from a town or village. Today it represents the peak of outdoor running defined by altitude and technicality and counts some 450,000 participants from 90 countries.

The International Skyrunning Federation presided by Giacometti, is the official governing body of the sport which is defined as “running in the mountains above 2,000m altitude where the climbing difficulty does not exceed II° grade and the incline is over 30%” or, the more poetic tagline, “Less cloud. More Sky”.